TRAINING CAMP
What is difficult becomes habitual, what is habitual becomes easy, what is easy is beautiful.
—Constantin Stanislavski, Stanislavski on Opera
Early in the afternoon of July 25, Tannenbaum was preparing for the undrafted-free-agent free-for-all. He drew up a seating chart for the long draft-room table and installed phone extensions at each spot. Laminated lists of the Jets’ targeted players and their agents’ telephone numbers were supplied to those who’d be doing the calling—Jets coaches and a few front-office people. Some teams were rumored to have been talking with players throughout the lockout, but not the Jets. The league had forbidden contact with any undrafted player until precisely 6:00 p.m. on July 25, and Tannenbaum had been a terrier about compliance.
Sanchez’s and Revis’s salaries alone cost nearly a quarter of the Jets’ salary-cap-enforced budget. So to complete his roster, Tannenbaum, like all NFL general managers, had to rely on cheap, undrafted free-agent rookies, who made the NFL minimum of $375,000—the late bloomers, small-school stars, and undercelebrated members of high-profile college-football programs. Out there, if you could find him, was a player who might turn out to be a Fred Jackson, who’d risen from being undrafted out of Iowa’s Coe College to his current status as featured running back with the Bills. Or even a Jim Langer, an undrafted linebacker from South Dakota State who signed with the Dolphins in 1970 and was gradually transformed into a Hall of Fame center. Every winter, undrafted free agents were named to the Pro Bowl, fanfares set in counterpoint to the springtime march of the first-round debutantes at Radio City Music Hall.
The undrafted free agents were of particular concern to Ryan. That he’d gone to Southwestern Oklahoma State and spent his early coaching career at those way-upriver football logging camps in Kentucky and New Mexico and had worked as somebody else’s assistant for twenty-five years before he became an NFL head coach had made Ryan feel like an undrafted free agent himself. It was no accident that when he took the Jets job, he’d brought the undrafted Bart Scott and Jim Leonhard along with him as his “flag-bearers.”
So it was that at 5:59, Ryan’s eyes fixed on the digital clock on the wall, his finger hovering above a landline keypad, the first eight numerals of Nick Bellore’s telephone number already dialed. The small, slow-seeming linebacker whose unusual aptitude for the game had made him a prolific college tackler—a poor man’s David Harris—had unique value to the Jets. He was reparation. If Ryan got Bellore, his drafting of Scotty McKnight wouldn’t functionally have cost the team anything.
All around Ryan, the other coaches were similarly on their keypad marks. The hour turned and everybody was talking at once. “You’re my guy,” Ryan told Bellore. The Jets hadn’t drafted him, he said, because “you’re not the quarterback’s best friend!” Ryan inquired as to what jersey number Bellore might prefer. Soon Sutton, who’d attended Eastern Michigan and coached at Western Michigan, was greeting the Central Michigan linebacker. “Nick! Long time.” Down-table, Pettine told Bellore’s agent, “If the kid can hear thunder and see lightning, he’s gonna make the team.”
Meanwhile, DT was talking with Julian Posey, the Ohio University cornerback. Ryan took the phone from DT midstream and introduced himself to Posey: “Do you know who we drafted? We took a receiver from Colorado. He’s the childhood best friend of our quarterback. My quarterback wanted him, I said, ‘Okay!’ We do the right thing by our players.” Every player Ryan spoke with, he told about Scotty McKnight. The players, he knew, had all heard about the cruel, impersonal NFL. Here was proof that in Florham Park, things weren’t that way. In bringing up McKnight, Ryan also seemed to be talking to those assembled around him, telling them semel in anno licet insanire—once a year a man was allowed to go a little crazy.
The scene itself was manic. The players bargained for time to sort out their offers, while the Jets, and every other team, tried to get them to commit. From the players’ perspective, it was deluge after a drought. Posey asked for thirty minutes “to think about it.” DT gave him twelve. To Jeff Tarpinian out in Iowa, Pettine was retailing the hybrid linebacking roles available to a smart linebacker in the Jets defense. Tannenbaum was giving “my word” to somebody’s agent. Five coaches were working on Posey. Excelling on special teams was the typical way for a player to make an NFL roster, and Ryan wanted Tarpinian to know “Westhoff’s crazy about you!” Then Ryan explained that the Jets had no depth at inside linebacker; unlike all those other coaches, Ryan didn’t just want Tarpinian, he needed him. DT was on the phone again with Posey, who was agonizing. “Dude,” DT said. “I can’t keep calling you back. Trust your gut. Your gut is telling you to say, Yeah!” DT listened. He frowned. He fingered the large cross around his neck. Then he said, “You put the phone down for twenty seconds and then pick the phone up and tell me what God said.” Pettine looked at me. “Feel like you’re on the floor of the stock exchange? Sell! Sell! Sell!”
On it went. Ryan was asking Tarpinian’s agent why the player was hesitating. Courtney Smith, a South Alabama receiver who’d visited the team in April, quietly signed on. Tannenbaum assured Bellore’s agent that the linebacker would be coached and developed with care. Then Tannenbaum was smiling. “Great news!” he said. Hanging up, he told the others, “Got him! That was the big one.” It was 6:41.
In the midst of all this, Jim Leonhard happened to call Jim O’Neil, his assistant coach. “Hey, Jim,” O’Neil greeted him. “We’re in the draft room trying to sign some Jim Leonhards!” Ryan asked DT about Posey, who turned out to be yet again on the clock. “He’s got until seven,” DT said. Ryan consulted his contacts sheet and dialed the number. “Posey,” he said. “This is God!” But Posey remained agnostic. Tannenbaum status-reported that Tarpinian was “fifty-fifty between us and New England.”
Ryan and Tannenbaum ordered in huge victory steaks for their supper to celebrate the signing of Bellore. Posey was proving a slippery commodity. It was as though he understood that as long as he held out, he maintained some control in his life, but once he committed, he’d again be just another face in the football crowd. At 7:00 and one second, Posey told DT he wanted to sleep on it. Ryan again took over and made a long and impassioned case for the way the Jets defense suited Posey’s style of play. The head coach didn’t, however, offer more bonus money, because the Jets had a hard ceiling of seven thousand dollars per player. Ryan listened to Posey and then he said, “Yeah, well, nobody else drafted you either.” Posey conceded that was true, but other teams had been calling him right through the winter, pledging their interest. Where had the Jets been? Tarpinian had said the same. Ryan explained that the Jets had held back because those were the rules. Rules, said Posey, hadn’t stopped other teams. “Well, how do you like those ethics?” Ryan asked Posey. Then Ryan began telling the cornerback about his future position coach. Did Posey realize that DT had taught the great Ronnie Lott how to play? That Troy Polamalu had gone to USC because of DT? And where else could Posey watch and learn from Darrelle Revis at practice every day? Posey said his mother was calling on the other line. “This guy!” DT exclaimed. “DT’s had to work harder to get Posey than he did to get Polamalu for USC!” O’Neil chortled. Ryan couldn’t resist: “That’s because he has less money to offer!”
A few minutes later, Posey called back. His gut was leaning toward the Chicago Bears. “That’s a safety-oriented cover-two defense,” DT said. “Corners get lost in that defense. I can hear it in your voice where you really want to go.” Posey was no lock even to make the Jets practice squad, and Ryan had never seen him play, but there had been nothing resembling real competition for him for months, and Posey was the present grail. Unable to reach Posey’s agent, Ryan was talking with the agent’s assistant. “He belongs here!” And then, indignant, “What do you mean, five corners? We only got three!” A moment later, multitasking, Ryan left Tarpinian a message telling him that the Patriots were already “four deep” at his position and that he’d be buried on the New England de
pth chart. Soon Ryan was dialing up the assistants to assistants. Sutton said it was a good thing Ryan wasn’t a college coach. He was so competitive that once he got up a head of recruiting steam, there was no telling what regulations he might inadvertently trample.
Tarpinian chose New England. Brian Ferentz, son of his Iowa college coach Kirk Ferentz, was on the Patriots staff. “We’ll knock him on his ass!” Ryan vowed. “How quickly it turns!” cried O’Neil. Tarpinian called Ryan to thank him. Ryan wished him luck and then warned Tarpinian he’d better “strap it up” when he played the Jets. At 8:40, Ryan got off the phone with Posey’s agent—“We’re still in, I think.”
A team typically takes ninety players to training camp. Only fifty-three will make the active roster. So the Jets were also trawling for what were known as camp bodies. “I got a guy from Villanova who will kill people as long as they don’t go to the left or right of him,” one personnel guy offered. Ryan pulled out a telephone number. He knew and liked the coach at Monmouth, a local college. The Monmouth coach had put in a word for his center, whose name was Tom. Ryan wasn’t sure of Tom’s last name (it was Ottaiano) so taking it to the zenith as always, Ryan referred to him as “Langer.” When Ryan reached “Langer” the head coach told him that each year, he claimed one draft choice and one undrafted choice, and this year Langer was his undrafted guy. “You ain’t gonna beat out Nick Mangold,” Ryan told the player amiably. “But go out and buy a Jets hat and talk shit and don’t be nervous.”
At midnight DT called Posey to wish him good night. Revis also telephoned out to Ohio with some honeyed words, and so it was that at 8:19 the next morning, despite his agent’s worries that the Bears would never want to work with him again, Julian Posey became a Jet. “What we just did was we got ourselves a couple of draft choices!” Pettine whooped. Watching DT accept congratulations for his recruiting work brought back memories for Carrier. He began telling everyone the story of how Dennis Thurman, USC class of ’78, had convinced him to renege on Notre Dame and go to USC. “You know,” said Carrier, “I never beat Notre Dame.” Everybody was now calling Ryan “Goose,” after the former New York Yankees relief ace Rich “Goose” Gossage. Hell, he’s Mariano Rivera, said Terry Bradway, invoking the finest closer of them all. The Jets had just signed three players they had thought about drafting.
All day, as these signings were being completed, the under-contract Jets players were drifting into the facility, and the building filled with back-to-school high spirits: in the corridors and offices, there were many shout-outs, many man hugs. The players wore casual clothes—work clothes, exercise clothes. Some of them made a great deal of money, lived in luxury homes, and drove designer cars, but inside the facility, there wasn’t much evidence of anybody’s wealth. The veteran who carried a Louis Vuitton satchel to meetings was the exception. Most players had student backpacks. Revis’s was a subdued plaid. Everybody blended.
DT’s TV was tuned to a soap opera for the strife he required, but he was paying more attention to the hallway, where “it sounds like it’s supposed to sound—guys making noise!” He and the other coaches scanned the faces of the players, looking for signs of softness that might indicate somebody had been relaxing and drinking a lot of beer. Most of the Jets appeared to have come through the interregnum lean and fit.
Dwight Lowery, the moody defensive back known as D-Lo, looked into Pettine’s office. Smiling, D-Lo said that he was now married and that love had changed the air for him. “My head is good! It wasn’t always right last year.” In a mellow state of mind was the longest-tenured Jet, Bryan Thomas. “I missed y’all,” BT told Pettine and Smitty. “My old lady was getting sick of me.”
The All-Pro center Nick Mangold, an alp of a man with a woolly blond beard and long blond locks, generally regarded the world with detached bemusement. But today, even Mangold was excited. When he saw Pettine he stretched out his enormous arms, cried, “My favorite mean guy!” and enveloped him.
Pettine, meanwhile, was beginning to contact the NFL free agents the Jets might be interested in. His first call went to Antwan Barnes. As a boy in Miami, Pettine said, Barnes had been so poor that he’d sometimes gone searching for meals in garbage dumpsters. Pettine had a lot of affection for him, which he now expressed by asking, “Hey, Barnesy, does your agent know who you are?” Many unsigned defensive players were calling Pettine and Ryan, promising they’d take less money to come to New York, proclaiming how fit they were. “I look like a superhero!” promised Trevor Pryce, once a dominant lineman but now five years on the “wrong side of thirty,” as the coaches would say. Kelly Gregg, just released by the Ravens, told Pettine, “I’ll wash the jocks, I’ll play for the minimum and beat up all day on that long-haired center of yours.”
Later, stopping back in Pettine’s office, I discovered Mark Sanchez, the starting quarterback, sprawled across a chair, bantering with Pettine. It was like Sanchez to visit the defensive coordinator and try to soften him up. An NFL training camp is long weeks of rivalry between offense and defense; for the next month of practices, Pettine would be trying to raze Sanchez’s hopes. Pettine seemed mildly disarmed. With his dark curly hair, sloe eyes, beauty marks, and pouty mouth, Sanchez could have been one of the soap stars on the TV down the hall in DT’s office. Being that good-looking, Sanchez was initially a startling presence in any room he walked into, but then he settled everyone down with his good nature. He was a carefree Californian who called most people “dude” and saw the world optimistically: there was little in life that wasn’t “sweet!” or “sick!”
These qualities had been in evidence when a Jets contingent that included Tannenbaum and Ryan went out to meet him in Los Angeles before the 2009 draft. On that day, Sanchez threw for them with prototypical passer’s form. His classic, tightly spinning balls stuck in receivers’ hands like broadheads in a tree. There was, the Jets people noticed, a much larger crowd of local receivers volunteering their time for Sanchez than was usual at such workouts. People liked him. The Jets took Sanchez to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles, and then afterward, as they walked through the parking lot, Sanchez said good-bye and hopped onto a motorcycle. The faces in the Jets group froze. “Kidding!” Sanchez cried, and he climbed off and walked on to his car.
Sanchez’s father, Nick, an Orange County Fire Department captain, sought to bring up Sanchez as a poised all-American. Nick devised simultaneous intellectual and sporting challenges, quizzing Sanchez about math, chemistry, or American history at the same time that Sanchez was hitting baseballs or throwing footballs. During batting practice, to develop his son’s toughness, Nick would pelt him with fastballs and make him shake each one off and keep hitting. Sanchez had taken up football late for a quarterback, in junior high school, and while he was a gifted, dedicated athlete, he had played only three years at USC, just one as a starter. Nick urged him to remain enrolled for his final college season. Sanchez’s college coach, Pete Carroll, advised the same.
As it happened, most people in the 2009 Jets draft room were with Nick Sanchez and Pete Carroll. Those Jets evaluators preferred Kansas State’s taller, more experienced Josh Freeman (now with Tampa Bay) and, in any case, disliked the idea of trading the strongbox of players and draft choices required to move up high enough in the draft to secure Sanchez. Making such a trade also meant a substantial long-term organizational commitment to an unproven man. The playful charm that drew other young athletes to Sanchez didn’t necessarily mean he’d be a commanding leader capable of holding grown men accountable. The one quality his USC teammates hadn’t admired in Sanchez was that during games, they could always tell just by looking at him if things were going against the quarterback. NFL players wouldn’t respect such pique. On a football field, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning were hard people. Each was absolutely dedicated to football and emanated the composure necessary to make the right choices under stress.
As a college player, Sanchez had of course also not yet proven his aptitude for panning the line of scrimmag
e and decoding the sophisticated intentions of a modern NFL defense. And after the snap, he rarely looked off defenders, meaning his intentions were too often apparent.
Ryan believed that you lost football games most quickly at two positions, quarterback and cornerback—especially at quarterback. Upon taking the Jets job, Ryan had no viable starting quarterback, and to his eyes, Sanchez was the best one available. Tannenbaum agreed. After the Jets dealt three players and two draft choices to the Browns in exchange for the fifth choice in the draft, Sanchez arrived in New Jersey to sign the most lucrative contract in franchise history. Looking up from the document, Sanchez said to Tannenbaum, “Wonder what my dad thinks now!” Tannenbaum considered that a promising moment.
The Jets quickly made Sanchez their starter, and in his first two seasons he led them to the AFC championship game—or perhaps they led him. In Sanchez’s young career, the Jets had carefully protected the “Sanchise,” emphasizing his virtues, limiting his playbook, minimizing his job competition, posting a media-relations staffer by his locker whenever he gave interviews. All this served to make Sanchez seem, from afar, like a football prince and reinforced the impression that Sanchez, although playing the leadership position, was still a kid. While he flashed the potential of some day becoming the polished, dynamic professional Ryan and Tannenbaum foresaw, he was still erratic, and so mostly he was a restricted element in a conservative run-first offense stocked with able veterans who gradually, over the course of the game, wore down the opposing defense. In the modern NFL, however, it would be too difficult to consistently win playing against the grain. And so now, after two years, the Jets hoped Sanchez was ready to begin his ascent as an efficient passer. Brady, after all, had begun as the caretaker of a Patriots offense filled with veteran talent. That the Jets still had no clear idea how good a quarterback Sanchez would become was nothing surprising; it pointed again to the difficulty in predicting the futures of football players and was part of the game’s mystery.
Collision Low Crossers Page 19
